NAVER D2SF Invests in Anyware Robotics to Expand AI-Powered Warehouse Automation
Warehouses have a quiet truth hiding behind the roar of forklifts and the rhythm of conveyor belts. Every box that moves from a truck to a pallet carries a little tax called gravity, repetition, and human fatigue. Logistics runs on muscle memory. The industry has spent decades asking people to do the kind of work that slowly wears the edges off the human body. That tension is exactly where Anyware Robotics decided to plant a flag. And this week the market tipped its cap.
Anyware Robotics just secured $12M in seed funding led by GFT Ventures, with Foothill Ventures, Black Forest Ventures, and Alumni Ventures joining the round. Jay Eum from GFT Ventures is stepping in at the board level, bringing the kind of investor perspective that understands robotics is not a science fair project. It is infrastructure. Real world, steel on concrete, boxes moving at scale. The kind of environment where theory gets punched in the mouth by physics.
Credit to CEO Thomas Tang and CTO Bruce Fan, along with co founders Sam Zhou and Torsten Schreiber, for building a team that reads like a robotics hit squad. 3 UC Berkeley robotics PhDs, a stack of patents, and deep experience across FANUC and GreyOrange. The resume matters, but the rhythm matters more. These are builders who understand that warehouses do not care about elegant slides. They care about throughput, reliability, and robots that show up ready to work the night shift.
Enter Pixmo. A mobile manipulator designed to do one of the least glamorous jobs in logistics: unloading boxes from trucks and containers. It is the kind of task that sounds simple until you try to automate it. Different box sizes. Awkward stacking. Endless variation. Pixmo leans into embodied intelligence and real world logistics data to make sense of the chaos. Today it unloads. Tomorrow it sorts, palletizes, depalletizes, and picks cases. Same robot. New software. The warehouse version of teaching an old dog a lot of new tricks.
The momentum is not stopping there. NAVER D2SF has also stepped in with a strategic investment that signals global belief in physical AI. Partnerships with FANUC and Saddle Creek Logistics are already validating the tech in live environments where safety, efficiency, and uptime are non negotiable. The bigger picture starts to come into focus. If robots can work anywhere, logistics starts to feel a lot less like a labor bottleneck and a lot more like a programmable system.
Congratulations to Thomas Tang, Bruce Fan, Sam Zhou, Torsten Schreiber, and the entire Anyware Robotics crew. Building robots that can thrive anywhere is not just clever branding. It is the kind of ambition that quietly reshapes industries 1 container, 1 pallet, 1 perfectly placed box at a time.